Dover’s Police Department tracked a rise in homicides, overdoses and shoplifting in the last year.
Homicides rose to six or seven from two, while shootings in the city remained the same, with 46 incidents reported in both 2023 and 2024.
Dover PD introduced its Quality of Life Initiative in November as a response to prevailing issues in the city, such as overdoses, drug use, lewdness and prostitution.
Calls for overdoses and people in crisis continued coming in, even with the city’s Behavioral Health Unit, staffed by one officer and one clinician.
Police chief Thomas Johnson said Dover PD’s annual report for 2024 shows officers responded to 210 overdose incidents, compared to 165 in 2023. He said that is an indication Dover is still feeling effects from the opioid epidemic.
“But at the same time, whenever you're looking at an annual report, it's a snapshot of 12 months. It's not necessarily indicative of a permanent condition,” Johnson said.
Dover also saw 6 homicides and nearly 17 hundred shoplifting incidents.
But Johnson said there are some numbers he is proud of.
“Our clearance rates for our major crimes continue to be in a good place.”
The Department resolved 100 percent of homicides, 73 percent of burglaries and 54 percent of shootings.
The report’s numbers indicated there was not enough improvement for the initiative to be considered successful. Still, Johnson said they will stick with it for now.
“We really need to finish the active portion of the operation, and … we're probably closer to the conclusion than we are the beginning at this point,” Johnson said. “...If you can get five or six months worth of data, that's probably a big enough sample size to actually figure out what we were able to accomplish.”
Johnson added the issues the Quality of Life Initiative seeks to address also call for long-term solutions for the Dover community. The initiative was not put in place with specific data reports or analyses in mind.
When putting the initiative in place, the Department planned on having conversations with people “flirting with violations, ticketing, making arrests and encouraging people to detox or seek treatment.
